Give Your Travel Enterprise A Boost With Travelcarma's Cutting-edge Travel Technology Solutions

By Author: TravelCarma
Total Articles: 1
Comment this article

How can various types of online travel businesses achieve greater profitability with the right technology solutions?

If you are an Online Travel Agency, you will need to use an Online Portal with a Travel Agency Booking Engine with the following components:

1) It should have customized search with relevant options
2) Ability to incorporate offers and deals quickly
3) A data-driven system to understand your customer behavior
4) A robust back office management module
5) Marketing tools to help promote your portal in this highly competitive landscape

Travel Agents and Tour Operators require a B2C/B2B Portal, or both, depending on their sales channels. A B2C portal allows you to sell your products directly to customers while a B2B portal is useful for agencies looking to sell through their sub-agents on a commission model. So the choice of the portal depends on the nature of the travel agency/tour operator business.

If you are a Destination Management Company, you need a software for DMCs that helps you distribute your inventory to agencies across various markets. Such a system ...
... needs to have a solid inventory management system, also known as a CRS. A CRS helps you feed in all your inventory with rates, availability and other business rules and policies. You can use it to manage your inventory of hotel rooms, activities/excursions, cars, transfers, chartered flights etc. In addition to the CRS, a DMC can leverage the Agency Management Module to manage their B2B sales channels – create sub agents/affiliates, manage their markups and commissions, track their performance and reward them accordingly.

Any Travel Business looking to make a mark for themselves in the the current climate is required to adopt an innovative system to attract your valuable customers. Large OTAs are offering heavy discounts on both individual services as well as packages, and you can’t compete unless you offer something unique to your targeted audience.

Some of the vital features of a high-end online booking system are as follows:

• Supports all online sales channels, including Direct Customers, Branches / Employees / Call Centre, Sub Agents, Corporate Customers, Affiliates / White Labels and XML Distributors such as OTAs, Wholesalers, Tour Operators
• Supports Instant Online Reservation of flights, hotels, cars, activities, packages and other ancillary services
• Supports Business specific booking rules and processes
• Provides a fast and smooth booking experience
• Multiple Search Filters based on prices, business name, business category etc
• Multiple sorting options for search results based on location, price, name etc.

Creating custom itineraries for each client is an extremely important step in offering personalized service to compete against OTAs that sell fixed packages. With a strong online booking system, you can easily search flights, hotels, activities and cars in the system with live rates based on the customer’s preferences, and put them together in a package.
Your registered customers can also log in to the system and create their own packages and make the booking online. You can also upload deals and promotions in the system which will reflect on the front end when a user makes a search.

Many of your customers may want make a booking but pay you later at your office. A good travel agency system would be able to offer you this flexibility to reserve the flight seat/hotel room for your customer and then collect the payment from them by cash/cheque. These features will surely help you satisfy your customers and generate more business.
Your competitors are investing heavily in travel technology to gain more leads and customers in this race and companies that don’t do so are going to be left behind. Therefore, It’s very important to use high-end travel technology to stay on top of your business, particularly if you aim to scale your business.

TravelCarma is a leading provider of online travel technology. We offer all the features mentioned in this article, and a lot more. Whether you’re a travel agency, tours/activity provider, DMC or a vehicle business, we have the right solution for you. Our solutions are available at an affordable monthly subscription as well on a licensed model for large companies.

Contact us today for a sales consultation.